Stalin

For a man possessed by raison d’état, Stalin’s actions were often highly personal. Nikolai Bukharin, unlike Trotsky, was close to the Soviet dictator. The two had met in Vienna in 1913, and from the mid-1920s Stalin had shown genuine affection for him. Alexei Balashov, who as a young man worked loyally in Stalin’s inner secretariat, would recall, late in life, that “when they brought him the forms with the results of politburo member voting by telephone poll, frequently, without looking up from the document, Stalin would ask, ‘How did Bukharin vote?—For?’ Stalin, for a time, held Bukharin’s views in high regard, and they informed the positions he himself would take.”⁹ Also unlike Trotsky, Bukharin had been careful not to come out in open opposition to Stalin. But in 1929, while forcing through his radical shift to coercive wholesale collectivization, Stalin charged Bukharin and his allies with “deviation” from the party line. Thus did the dictator fashion for himself and the regime a new high-profile internal foe.¹⁰

Bukharin, who had been instrumental in enabling Stalin to smash Trotsky, inadvertently facilitated his own demonization by Stalin. The stepped-up attacks were set in motion by the sudden appearance of a pamphlet published by a shadowy Trotskyite underground on January 23, 1929, which carried Lev Kamenev’s “notes,” nominally for Zinoviev, of a clandestine meeting Bukharin had initiated with Kamenev back on July 11, 1928.¹¹ Bukharin was caught out: he had met on the sly with a former oppositionist and divulged to him internal party matters while privately voicing the opposite position to the July 1928 plenum resolutions that he himself had drafted. The incident went to the party’s Central Control Commission, chaired by the Stalin loyalist Sergo Orjonikidze, who generally disliked Stalin’s political vendettas and, till now, had tried to reconcile Bukharin and his patron. But Kamenev’s “notes” had Bukharin asserting that Orjonikidze had bad-mouthed Stalin behind his back. Kamenev, for his part, submitted written testimony, which, like the “notes” themselves, proved damning of Bukharin, a further act of ingratiation with Stalin. Bukharin belatedly surmised that he had fallen into a trap, while Stalin gave the appearance of being pained to have to take action. (“Sad as it is, I must report the fact of . . .”) At the first of two joint sessions of the politburo with the presidium of the Central Control Commission, on January 30, 1929, Stalin condemned Bukharin, as well as his associates Mikhail Tomsky and Alexei Rykov, as “a right deviationist, capitulationist group advocating not for the liquidation of capitalist elements of the city and countryside, but for their free development.”¹²

Thus did opposition to forced collectivization and coercive grain collection become advocacy for capitalism. Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky wrote an appeal invoking Lenin’s Testament—“since these words were written, this ‘unbounded power’ has become even more ‘unbounded’”—but on February 9, 1929, with Orjonikidze in charge, the party censured Bukharin, for having met Kamenev, and Rykov and Tomsky, for having failed to report it.¹³

Stalin, in parallel, had been reading summaries by the secret police (OGPU) of the intercepted correspondence between Trotsky and his adherents exiled at the far ends of the USSR who were gloating that Stalin’s radical turn had vindicated their long-standing leftist advocacy for class war against kulaks and NEPmen. Stalin read out excerpts at the politburo, which acceded to his pique and voted to deport Trotsky.¹⁴ Turkey granted a visa, and on January 20, the OGPU appeared in Alma-Ata and loaded up the Trotsky family and their belongings. On February 10 in Odessa, an OGPU convoy smuggled him, his wife, Natalya Sedova, and their elder son, Lev Sedov, aboard the steamship Ilich. Troops lined the harbor. There were no other passengers. The order for deportation was silent about Trotsky’s personal archives—and if not expressly told to confiscate, the secret police did not confiscate. Trotsky managed to carry out crates of documents and books.¹⁵ It took fewer than two weeks for two of his essays to appear in the “bourgeois” press. In “How Could This Happen?” Trotsky explained his defeat by allowing that Stalin was “gifted in a practical sense, endurance, and perseverance in the pursuit of outlined goals,” but added that “his political horizon is inordinately narrow. His theoretical level is just as primitive. His pastiche booklet Foundations of Leninism, in which he tries to pay tribute to the party’s theoretical traditions, teems with schoolboy errors. . . . What is Stalin?” Trotsky concluded. “The outstanding mediocrity in our party.”¹⁶